He Loves to Tell the Story

Scripture: Acts 9, 22, and 26

You may have heard a joke that goes something like this:

A man who had driven to an important business meeting couldn’t find a parking space near the building where the meeting was being held. He drove around and around, growing more and more frantic, and running later and later. He imagined missing the meeting, losing his job, and suffering through all the hardship that this would mean for him and his family. So, desperate, he called out to God: “Oh, Lord. I pray that you might help me find a parking space. If you do, I’ll give up swearing and smoking and drinking. I’ll go to church every Sunday. I’ll give generously to charity. I’ll read ten chapters from the Bible every morning of my life!” At the instant he stopped speaking, an amazing thing happened: a car pulled out of a parking space right in front of the building where the meeting was just about to begin. The man smiled, looked up toward heaven, and said: “Never mind. I’ve got one.”

The Bible is full of stories where God intervenes in someone’s life—usually more successfully than this—in a sudden, dramatic, and unmistakable way. One of the most famous of these stories concerns the experience of a Roman citizen named Saul while he was traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians on behalf of the empire. A Hollywood version of the experience would include a lot of special effects: there is a blinding flash of light, a violent fall, a disembodied voice, and—perhaps most remarkably—a changed man. Saul becomes Paul, and one of our faith’s most formidable personalities enters history—and changes its course forever.

It is a really good story. Indeed, it is such a good story that it appears in the book of Acts three times. It appears in the ninth chapter, where we hear it in Luke’s narrative voice. It appears in the twenty-second chapter, where Paul describes the experience to a mob that has seized him and thrown him out of the Temple. And it appears in the twenty-sixth chapter, where Paul shares it with King Agrippa, the descendent of Herod appointed by Rome to rule Judea.

Luke loves to tell the story. And he has reasons.

At first blush, we might think that those reasons have to do with the dramatic nature of the event. After all, Luke is a master storyteller and there is plenty of fodder here for masterful storytelling—the fireworks, the voice-over, the body crashing to the ground, and so on. You don’t need to be able to write like Luke, or paint like Caravaggio, to make this interesting.

Still, all this drama may distract us from the details that make this story not just a good one, but an extraordinarily important one for each and every one of us. Those details show that this is not just a story about what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Rather, this is a story that says something about all of us as we go down our respective roads and meet God along the way.

That is why Luke loves to tell the story. And that is where things really get interesting.

Let’s start with this detail: the Lord calls Saul by name—indeed, twice by name. And the Lord does not ask “why are you persecuting those who believe in me?” but “why are you persecuting me?” This detail holds true in all three versions of the story so it seems fair to treat it as an important one—and, indeed, it is. After all, this language does not portray the Lord as a distant and abstract entity with whom we can only have a theoretical relationship. To the contrary, this language describes a God with a human voice, with the capacity to feel the pain of persecution, and with whom we can have a real and personal relationship.

I realize that talk about a personal relationship with God has become a cliché. But I am not alluding to the saccharine sweet version of this idea that shows up on bumper stickers and t-shirts. I am referring to the powerful, sublime, and occasionally frightening expression of this idea that appears in the scriptures.

I am referring to the repeated instances in the Bible where people talk with and argue with and engage with God—and God responds in kind. It is tempting to say that these people behave as if God were right there with them, but this misses the point because the scripture makes clear that God is right there with them. I certainly do not agree with everything written by the prominent theologian Paul Ramsey. But I think he got it exactly right when he observed that, throughout the Bible, “[people] meet God, not simply a conception of God.”

The second detail I want to emphasize is a bit subtler—it concerns something that’s missing from the story. Of course, we ordinarily think of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus as a conversion story—indeed, the ultimate conversion story. We might even admit to a little conversion envy, puzzling over why our experience of faith lacks the flash and thunder of Paul’s.

And, yet, in these lines Paul says nothing about having a change of heart or mind or spirit. In other words, what’s missing from this conversion story is any evidence that a conversion occurred. We’re told that Paul was blinded; we’re told that Paul fell to the ground; we’re told that Paul heard a voice. We’re not told that Paul became a different man.

There is a good reason for this: it does not need to be said, and if it were said in the context of these isolated events we would have no reason to believe it. That Paul has changed is not revealed by this story but by what comes next. It is revealed by what Paul stops doing and what he starts doing. It is revealed in how Paul spends every waking hour for the remainder of his life.

I think this reflects a deep psychological truth. Experiences that have a profoundly transformative effect on us do not need to be declared. Their significance will be shown and known in what comes next.

The third detail I want to focus on relates to the differences in the versions of the story. In his book, What Paul Meant, Garry Wills summarizes them nicely:

“In one version, bystanders fall down when Paul does. In another, they stay standing. In one, the bystanders see a light, but hear no voice. In another, they hear a voice but see nothing. By the third version, what the voice says is considerably expanded in length as well as intention.”

Luke loves to tell the story. But he never tells it exactly the same way twice.

Commentators have offered various explanations for these discrepancies. Some suggest that these variations relate to the different narrative voices heard in the text. This makes sense. After all, we would expect Luke’s description of what happened to Paul to differ from Paul’s description of his own experience. Some suggest that the story changes not because of the speaker but because of the audience. This makes sense, too. For example, Paul offers a more expansive version of the story during his discursive, indeed oddly relaxed, meeting with King Agrippa than he does during his confrontational encounter with the angry mob.

Still, I don’t find these explanations completely satisfying. Differences in who sees the flash of light and who hears the voice don’t seem to have much to do with variations in speakers or audiences. So I’d like to offer another possibility—one that calls for no elaborate reinterpretations of the text, that fully embraces the discrepancies, and that seems to me completely consistent with what we know about human beings and believe we know about God.

Think of it this way. Something remarkable happened to Paul on the road to Damascus—something powerful; something disorienting; something incapable of being expressed through the coarse filters of human understanding and memory and language; something deeply and wonderfully mysterious. All encounters with God must have some such mystery to them. More than a dozen centuries later, the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke captured this same sense of mystery when he praised God as “the gentlest of ways,” “the forest that always surrounds us,” the “song we sing in every silence,” the “great homesickness we can never shake off.”

Sometime we confuse mystery with distance and convince ourselves that God is mysterious because God is remote. But this ignores the mystery that inheres in so many things that are close to us. Indeed, those things may strike us as the most mysterious of all. As poet W.S. Merwin observed, the “mystery is no more lucid for being near.”

Perhaps no one ever understood this beautiful mystery of our relationship with God better than Paul, the one who reminded us that in this life we see “through a glass, darkly.” The story of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, therefore, resists surgical precision and perfection of detail. It is not that kind of story.

So Paul’s encounter with the Lord has three characteristics. First, it is highly personal. Second, it is deeply transformative. And, third, it is profoundly mysterious. We have a word for a relationship that is highly personal, deeply transformative, and profoundly mysterious. We call it love. And that is what happens on the road to Damascus. God showers divine love on—of all people—Saul of Tarsus. And Paul begins to fall in love with God.

The more amazing thing, though, is how Paul stays in love with God. Twenty-two books follow the book of Acts in the New Testament. Thirteen of them are traditionally attributed to Paul. They are letters, of course—efforts by Paul to provide guidance to the communities of Christians that sprawled across the empire. But they are also Paul’s love letters to God.

They are letters in which Paul celebrates a love that is patient and kind; that is not boastful or arrogant or rude; that rejoices in the truth; that bears all things and believes all things and hopes all things and endures all things; a love that never ends. They are letters in which Paul demonstrates his dedication to Jesus’ commandment that we should love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.

Along the way, Paul struggles. He struggles with divisive elements within the far-flung Christian communities; he struggles with a world still filled with suffering and sickness and sadness and sin; he struggles with his own weakness. Nothing new here: he struggled from the beginning. As we have seen, he even struggled in his efforts to describe what happened to him on the road to Damascus. That story proved too personal, transformative, and mysterious to lend itself to precise expression. But it doesn’t matter. It is one of the greatest love stories ever told. And he loves to tell the story.

You have a story, too. It may not feature bright lights or big voices or ecstatic tumbles to the ground. But that’s not surprising. You see, to reverse Paul Ramsey’s trenchant observation, God meets us—not simply a conception of us. So God embraces us in ways that we will find personal and transformative and mysterious.

Some of us will get knocked off the horse. Some of us will slide off slowly. Some of us will cling to the reins and resist. Some of us will be grabbed by the lapels and shaken. Some of us will be gently tapped on the shoulder. But all of us will be touched.

And then there’s the other half of the story—the story of your love for God. How will you life reflect that love? What comes next? How will your love be shown and known? What will this personal, transformative, mysterious experience do for you, and to you, and through you?

Once you have the answers, won’t you love to tell the story?

Amen.